Laure Prouvost - See Star at Gana Art

Gana Art presents Laure Prouvost: SEE STAR from 27th April at Gana Art Bogwang, a solo exhibition of Laure Prouvost.

The show will comprise 22 works that emanate the essence of Prouvost's creative world, ranging from two-dimensional works, sculpture, video art, tapestry, etc. In addition to the mediums above, Prouvost holds experimental exhibitions in sound art, installation, and performance. The iconic trait that penetrates all of her works is the narrative that plays with language along with the images and moves between the real and the fiction. For instance, the visual artwork Wantee which awarded the artist the Turner Prize in 2013, told a narrative of the disappearance of the fictional character 'granddad,' which continued to a participatory digging performance in search of her 'granddad' in her exhibition at Rupert Museum in South Africa in 2015. Such ingenuity of Prouvost's artistic creativity won her career great critical acclaim: she won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2011, represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2019, and was chosen as a commissioned artist for KANAL-Centre Pompidou to inaugurate the Façade series of the museum. In addition, her works were featured at the Busan Biennale and Atelier Hermès in Korea last year. In the present exhibition, she plans to humorously narrate her contemplations on the concepts of solidarity and coexistence through the series SEE STAR, Reliques, and This Means.

 

SEE STAR, a series that also became the title of the present exhibition, is a homonym for the word 'sister,' a word that denotes a female relationship with another female and speaks of women's solidarity. The blue screen is full of entwined octopus limbs as if to metaphorise the ocean's depth. The octopus is a recurrent motif in Prouvost's narratives and an important proxy for the artist, appearing in narratives of the missing granddad, the grandma who makes carpets and potteries, and the uncle who establishes travel agencies around the world. Deep See Blue Surrounding You, a work featured at the 2019 Venice Biennale, too exhibited the octopus as the primary subject matter. It was portrayed as an autonomous entity that, through its multiple limbs, senses everything and possesses the power to communicate with the external world. The octopus limbs in the three pieces of SEE STAR transform into the shape of hands and breasts, holding a flag of solidarity that says "IN ONE ANOTHER", "TOGETHER AS ONE", "NO MORE FRONT TEARS", and "MORE SEE." They also become a bosom that embraces everything and nurtures life, breastfeeding other creatures. Visitors can put their hands into the attached silk gloves that penetrate the canvas to join such solidarity. On the other hand, the physical form of four to five canvases connected into one and the scene where silk gloves hold the three-dimensional flag work are other pivotal viewing points.

 

Behind the SEE STAR series that also reflects the artist's experience of giving birth, a sculpture is located with a rather long title: MOTHER got drunk from this glass before making an other human brain on the 4th of February. On top of the table is a blue glass cup where the words from the title are written as a sign. The glass cup may at first glance seem like a mundane object, but it is redefined as a divine relic with a powerful spell with the sentence that reminds us of a specific situation. For Prouvost, words and writings are "a kind of physical material no different from the earth" and transform into a work of art by being employed in the right place. In particular, she seems to believe that language is a powerful tool like no other to evoke the audience's imagination. Reliques series focuses precisely on this point. The present exhibition features a peculiar teabag that surfaced glistening from grandma's bathtub along with the glass cup present in the moment of the mother conceiving a child. In addition, THIS SIGN WANTS TO ESCAPE WITH YOU DEEPER, which hypnotises the visitor by bumping into them in a haphazard situation or Empowered Pigeons that features two omnipotent pigeons stimulate the visitor's imagination to infinity.

 

Prouvost ends up creating a unique language after having explored the depth of the logic of object, language, and perception. This Means series is composed of the question "What does this mean?" followed by the answer "This means x". As if to associate the work with flashcards for children's language learning, the work juxtaposes words with images. The difference with regular flashcards is that the artist connects the words and the corresponding images from a highly subjective perspective. In the world of This Means, goat translates to "you," orange to "love," and one glove to "loss" (and the blue glass cup, unsurprisingly, to "mom!"). The cacophony of the symphony of words and images in this series triggers the memory and imagination of the visitors. Perhaps one can be reminded of "you" who used to love goats and the orange that "you" used to peel for them and who left one day leaving only one glove behind, never to return. Of course, the number of narratives will be as many as the number of visitors.

 

While This Means commands something clearly without adulteration, the narrative which reaches each visitor continuously escapes the system of signification. At this point precisely, Prouvost reexamines how fragile and inattentive language can be, the giant system of agreement in human society. The artist, however, is not sceptical. Quite the contrary: she connects the threads of narratives that begin from misreading and misinterpretation and finds a new reciprocal interaction. She is searching for new solidarity while looking beyond the possibility of the co-existence of things that do not necessarily have to be put into the same category. The present exhibition will reveal 7 pieces from the This Means series in drawing, tapestry, and video art variations. The visitors will face the works on the second floor of the exhibition hall through the maze constructed in the form of octopus limbs for the effect of going back to when they were kids learning a language for the first time.

 

From SEE STAR, which contains the message of solidarity, to Reliques and This Means, which discuss the idea of communication and coexistence, the narratives that Laure Prouvost unravelled in Gana Art Bogwang will be strayed even further and spread out in disarray as they meet the visitors. The visitors are at complete liberty to imagine whichever they please. The artist tells us that 'it is okay to be different; in fact, precisely our difference makes us interesting and rich.' It is as if to argue that solidarity, as ironic as it is, begins from a difference. Gana Art shares the hope that the present exhibition, which continues until 30th May, will endow such thought and experience.